Some Notes on the Master's Birthdays

Some Notes on the Master's Birthdays From Leon Edel, Honorary Chairman, The Henry James Sesquicentennial Editor's Note: These remarks were prepared by Professor Edel for delivery at the opening session of the Henry James Sesquicentennial conferences at New York University, June 2,1993, the first two days of which were devoted to "Rethinking Gender and Sexual Politics: Henry James in the New Century.' ' I regret very much that I'm unable to attend your high festivities in celebration of Henry James's 150th birthday, but at least I can address these few words to you as your honorary chairman. I'm sitting in my study, looking down at Diamond Head and the multicolored Pacific, listening to Polynesian birds, and it has occurred to me that I might, appropriately, out of my backlog of Jamesiana, provide you with a tiny anthology of Henry James themes on the very subjects you will discuss. After leading off with my credentials as a celebrator of James anniversaries , I'll offer an inspired Jamesian quotation about modern feminism. I'll then remind you how he amused himself with "the crying game" of gender, and continue to his warnings of the dangers a sexual revolution poses for the novel. And finally, for those of you seeking to reconstruct the James family around Henry James, it will be useful to see how he might feel about that. And remember, in quoting the Master, we quote a Master-ironist. I have lived 85 of James's 150 years and have celebrated many of his birthdays and other landmark occasions. The most significant was I suppose the centenary in 1943 which Bryn Mawr seems to have been alone in observing: it could boast that James had delivered a commencement address on its campus in 1905—his significant "The Question of Our Speech" subsequently published. I spoke briefly then not yet aware that I would become his biographer. W. H. Auden, approaching an earlier prime, his face still smooth and unwrinkled, read us his newest poem, ' 'At the Grave of Henry James' ' and certain famous words associated with Bryn Mawr graced the occasion. On the 50th anniversary of James's death in 1916—that is in 1966—I published a brief tribute in the New York Herald Tribune on James as our ' 'poet of prose.' ' And ten years later, when James was 60 The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 129-131 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 130 The Henry James Review years dead, I helped make the arrangements for James's admission to the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey and spoke form the pulpit under the soaring arches, to an audience composed largely of the British writing establishment. My address was later published in the TLS and the inaugural issue of the Henry James Review. I speak to you today, thus, as an old hand at Jamesian commemorations. I will first confine myself to extracting for you from James's 1899 essay on "The Future of the Novel" certain sentences relevant to our gathering today. The first I come on, singularly prophetic, uttered when Victoria still ruled in Britain , is a part of James's listing of things then missing from the Anglo-American novel. James wrote that "nothing is more salient in English life today to fresh eyes, than the revolution taking place in the position and outlook of women—and taking place much more deeply in the quiet than even the noise on the surface demonstrates—so we may very well yet see the female elbow—itself kept in increasing activity by the play of the pen—smash with final resonance the window all this time most superstitiously closed.' ' That was a remarkably fine declaration to make in the last year of the old century. Before this, five years earlier, he was having his fun with the gender question in such a tale as "The Death of the Lion" of 1894 in which the narrator describes certain authors attending a party at the home of a socialite—a grand house entitled Prestidge. There turns up a very popular writer, a pretty diminutive woman with cropped hair, whose name is Miss Collop, but who is...